Third-party creators produce sound libraries for use with Kontakt, and many of these have no cost to you. If you’ve purchased the full Kontakt Komplete package, you have a very affordable option for widely expanding your personal sound library collections. Both products are in version 6 at the time of publication. Just as Adobe makes a read-only version of its PDF creation software, NI offers both a full-featured commercial version of Kontakt as well as a free offering that concentrates on playback that includes a smaller library of sounds. Kontakt emerged from a crowded playing field by taking a note from the Adobe playbook.
While many of Native Instruments’ products seem oriented to the DJ market, the sheer versatility of Kontakt made it appealing to virtually all digital music creators. The modular synth, Reaktor, was the company’s flagship product, then called Generator and the software sampler Kontakt made its debut in the early 2000s. Dating back to 1995, Berlin-based Native Instruments has been a mainstay in the digital audio world for much of the 21st Century.
